Actions Have Consequences (1)

I was heading somewhere in my post on Tuesday [1]; today, here, I hope to get there. I was writing about how a favorite conservative bromide—"ideas have consequences"—also applies to them, and in spades. The saying is marshaled, self-righteously, as a way for conservatives to "argue" that everything bad in modern life, from Mao's Great Famine to Susan Smith driving her children into a lake, can be traced back in origin to awful liberal intellectuals—say, Emmanuel Kant, arguing that humans can derive moral codes from our faculty for reason.

In other words, when the right uses it, it tends to be in the service of a really stupid point.

When I say it, the logical chain is more proximate: when you go around quoting Reagan that "government isn't the solution; government is the problem," you get, well, problematic government (to this audience, I don't need to elaborate the point). And when you base a movement on such an idea, and an entire political and public relations architecture around insinuating the idea into the mind of every American citizen until they come to believe it as if on instinct, it's hard then to turn on a dime and say (as I noted on Tuesday [1] my conservative friend had) that: well, maybe government isn't really so bad after all, and should pump ten trillion dollars from Washington into the economy to save us from depression.

Hard, but not impossible.

For, as we clearly see, in these times of manifest crisis, conservatives are perfectly willing to say that. Like my friend. And like, to pull another example, Steve Forbes: yes, Mr. Flat Tax, the man who spent the 1990s that a universal 17 percent income tax rate would solve all the world's problems—and who was still saying so in 2005 [2] Now, guess what? Steve says we should be saving America's financial system by calling the $700 billion infusion so far merely a prelude to greater system intervension [3] to "save the patient."

We'll pay for it by collecting box tops.

But here's the point I'm getting ready to make. Everyone, including the most "conservative" "fiscal conservatives" are onboard agreeing with the obvious, that government's role is indeed, as the Constitution demands, to act to promote the general welfare. And what are the consequences of that? Neil Cavuto, in this video [3], understands: "The New Deal stayed the deal eighty years later." And thank God, of course, for that. Liberals used have a saying to explain the heyday of their political success: "Nobody shoots Santa Claus." Al Smith first said it in 1936—when the series of measures rammed into place [4] in the early innings of America's greatest economic crisis took hold, the public decided they liked them, and came to the realization that the government taking a bigger stake in our collective welfare was something they were willing to back with their votes for generations.

It took a whole lot of Republican ooga-booga-ooga in the 1960s and after [5] to begin shaking that conviction. Well, now is our one-in-a-century chance to take those gains back. Forty years of congealed psychic hegemony about the inherent malevolence of government are melting like a mortgage-backed security. That makes for opportunities from which progressives cannot shrink.

Read what Tom Frank wrote this week [6]:

For decades Republicans have made policy with a higher purpose in mind: to solidify the GOP base or to damage the institutions and movements aligned with the other side. One of their fondest slogans is "Defund the Left," and under that banner they have attacked labor unions and trial lawyers and tried to sever the links between the lobbying industry and the Democratic Party. Consider as well their long-cherished dreams of privatizing Social Security, which would make Wall Street, instead of Washington, the protector of our beloved seniors. Or their larger effort to demonstrate, by means of egregious misrule, that government is incapable of delivering the most basic services.

That these were all disastrous policies made no difference: The goal was to use state power to achieve lasting victory for the ideas of the right.

On the other side of the political fence, strategic moves of this kind are fairly rare. Instead, for most of my lifetime, prominent Democratic leaders have been chucking liberalism itself for the sake of immediate tactical gain....

Still, conservatives have always dreaded the day that Democrats discover (or rediscover) that there is a happy political synergy between delivering liberal economic reforms and building the liberal movement. The classic statement of this fear is a famous memo that Bill Kristol wrote in 1993, when he had just started out as a political strategist and the Clinton administration was preparing to propose some version of national health care.

"The plan should not be amended; it should be erased," Mr. Kristol advised the GOP. And not merely because Mr. Clinton's scheme was (in Mr. Kristol's view) bad policy, but because "it will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests."

Kristol knew that providing health care to all Americans was an seventy-year idea—one that would keep people voting Democratic, not merely in 1994 (which they didn't—because, after all, Bill Clinton had failed to deliver them healthcare), but in 2064. As I noted in the speech that inspired Tom's column [7]: "It is the duty of every generation of Democrats to produce new geese to lay 70 years of golden eggs. It is the only way our party has grown—as Bill Kristol puts it, by reviving the reputation of the Democrats as the generous protector of middle-class interests. They know they're screwed if we're credible in our pledge to deliver new kinds of power to ordinary people in their every day lives."

"No one shoots Santa Claus": even Republicans, back then, got the message. Like they're getting the message now: when the economy is in a crisis, the idiot ideas they use to protect their economic privileges have to be thrown out the window. Let them try to deny it—let them rant like Neil Cavuto below. Then they will only squander the public's trust further. And open the public up to trusting us more.

This is our moment. Govern; govern well; and keep your promises, progressivess, and this is our era.